Isabel Allende’s literary balance is this: almost thirty books, 77 million copies sold and translations into 42 languages. That is why she is the most widely read writer in Spanish in the history of literature. She was born in Lima. She is 80 years old. She works in a late-19th-century Victorian mansion in Sausalito, a town overlooking the San Francisco Bay (USA) where on clear days you can see Alcatraz Island. This house was the first brothel in the area. The business changed to a chocolate cookie factory. Later it served as a Christian church and today it is his office.
His father, diplomat Tomás Allende, was a first cousin of Chilean President Salvador Allende. When Pinochet’s coup d’état (September 11, 1973), she went into exile in Venezuela (13 years) and later in the US. She started writing theater. In 1982 she published her first best seller, The House of Spirits. Later came more novels, more publishing successes and some blows. The death of her daughter Paula deciphered in a homonymous text of exorcism and mourning. And for Paula, who died at the age of 28, she created the Isabel Allende Foundation to support migrant women and children on the US-Mexico border.. Paula had worked as a volunteer in marginalized communities (in Venezuela and Spain) as an educator and psychologist.
That border in 2019 and the Vienna invaded by the Nazis in 1938 are two of the spaces in the latest novel by Isabel Allende, the wind knows your name (Plaza & Janes). And two characters separated by more than 70 years, the Austrian Samuel and the Salvadoran Anita, give wind to a story of immigrants, of lonely children, of mothers who have to separate from them in order to save them from hell. A story of uncertainty, of solidarity, of people helping people and others humiliating others. And, in between, some bursts of love. And helplessness. And a combination of history and present with the same visible damage. ‘The wind knows your name’.